Science and mathematics — Robinson Jeffers

"Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monsters feet there are left the mountains."

"He takes it in the naked ecstasy; it breaks in his hand, the atom is broken, the power that massed it Cries to the power that moves the stars, "I have come home to myself, behold me. I bruised myself in the flint mortar and burnt me In the red shell, I tortured myself, I flew forth, Stood naked of myself and broke me in fragments, And here am I moving the stars that are me." I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings."

"I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning ones affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on ones self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions — the world of spirits. I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us."

"The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you have forgotten us, mother. You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline. It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter; life retains Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the insolent quietness of stone."

"Then what is the answer? — Not to be deluded by dreams. To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before. When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential. To keep ones own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled."

"Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment, they have had what they wanted"

"I appeal to all pupils, students and young people, asking you to focus on the horizons that are opening up for you, and which you could only dream of a year ago. Our future will depend on your desire for education and moral values as well as on your entrepreneurial spirit."

"We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems."

"We are shocked when we see educators, timid before criticism and confused about first principles, betray their trust. And we wonder what can be that philosophy of education which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool."

"An [hypertext] encyclopaedia will be an overall attempt by the knowledgeable, the learned societies or anyone else, to represent the state-of-the-art in their field. An encyclopaedia will be a living document, as up to date as it can be, instantly accessible at any time. It will contain carefully authored explanations and summaries of the subject, as well as computer-generated indexes of literature. A reference to a paper from the encyclopaedia conveys authority and acceptance by academic society. A measure of a paper’s standing may be conveyed by the number of links it is away from an encyclopaedia."

"A sample of the modern debate, which neatly summarizes the anti-reductionist position is provided by Grene (1974). She points out that in principle a one-level ontology—the belief, for example, that with increasing knowledge all science will become an account of the world in the language of, say, atomic events—contradicts itself. This is so because such a belief, to be meaningful, requires an ontology which admits both atomic events and cognition. Here at once a second level is smuggled in! It is logically possible... that there might be no levels in between those of atomic events and cognition (that in essence is Descartess position) but the sciences of chemistry and biology consist of some well-tested conjectures that there are such intermediate levels as are represented by molecules, cells, organelles, organs, and organisms."

"All competent thinkers agree with Bacon that there can be no real knowledge except that which rests upon observed facts. This fundamental maxim is evidently indisputable if it is applied, as it ought to be, to the mature state of our intelligence. But, if we consider the origin of our knowledge, it is no less certain that the primitive human mind could not, and indeed ought not to, have thought in that way. For if, on the one hand, every Positive theory must necessarily be founded upon observations, it is, on the other hand, no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory or other. If in contemplating phenomena we did not immediately connect them with principles, not only would it be impossible for us to combine these isolated observations, and therefore to derive profit from them, but we should even be entirely incapable of remembering facts, which would for the most remain unnoted by us. Thus there were two difficulties be overcome: the human mind had to observe in order to form real theories, and yet had to form theories of some sort before it could apply itself to a connected series of observations. The primitive human mind, therefore, found itself involved in a vicious circle, from which it would never have had any means of escaping, if a natural way of the difficulty had not fortunately found by the spontaneous development of Theological conceptions. ...chimerical hopes ..exaggerated ideas of mans importance in the universe to which the Theological Philosophy ...at the commencement, ...afforded an indispensable stimulus without the aid which we cannot, indeed, conceive how the primitive human mind would have been induced to undertake any arduous labours."